Welch fights back over outrage over his Tweet

Former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch wrote an op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal explaining in detail why he questioned – in a Tweet – the most recent federal jobs data numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed the national unemployment dropping below 8 percent for the first time in years to 7.8 percent.

The WSJ piece came after Welch and his wife resigned from contributor posts from Fortune magazine and Thompson Reuters after one of their editors was critical of Welch’s Tweet.

Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO who once lived in Delmar, defends his questioning of the U.S. labor statistics in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.

Welch says he has a right to question the data since much of it is hardly based on narrowly-based scientific evidence. He says that essentially, the data is created through census workers talking to 60,000 households over a one week period either by phone (in 70 percent of the cases) or by knocking on doors. And a lot of the answers can be open to interpretation.

“Some questions allow for unambiguous answers, but others less so. For instance, the range for part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours a week. So, if an out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, ‘I got one baby-sitting job this week just to cover my kid’s bus fare, but I haven’t been able to find anything else,’ that could be recorded as being employed part-time,” Welch writes.

To see the whole column, in which Welch compared the outrage over his Tweet to something that might happen in “Soviet Russia” or “Communist China,” click here.

If you don’t have time to read the whole column, Welch’s skepticism is based on that the September data is some of the best since the 1980s. For instance, BLS estimated that state, local and federal governments added 602,000 workers and overall there were 873,000 workers hired.

That’s the “largest one-month increase since 1983, during the booming Reagan recovery,” Welch says, despite the fact that the labor participation rate of 63 percent is the lowest since 1981.